GMAT Question of the Day – Data Sufficiency – Algebra/Threshold

In a certain company 2/5 of the employees are either engineers or scientists. What is the ratio of engineers to scientists?

(1) There are 75 employees in the company

(2) There are more than 3 times as many engineers as there are scientists

[spoiler]E.[/spoiler]

GMAT Question of the Day Solution

It’s good policy on GMAT Data Sufficiency to spend as much time as necessary to understand the question before moving on to the statements. The questions (and the information given in the question) are your friends. In this question of the day there isn’t a ton of information in the question but still it might help to write out that 2/5’s of the company is made up of Engineers and Scientists and that we are looking for E/S.

Statement 1 tells us that that E + S = 30. But we don’t know what the mix is. Insufficient.

Statement 2 tells us that the ratio is greater than 3 to 1. So the ratio could be 3:1 or 4:1 or 7:2. Many possibilities. Insufficient.

Putting the statements together provides some limitations but not enough of them to narrow the ratio down. We could have 29 engineers and 1 scientist or 28 engineers and 2 scientists. Both ratios are greater than 3 to 1. Multiple possibilities. Insufficient.